Kaija Saariaho and Peter Sellars’ “Only the Sound Remains” (2016): Transcoding the Aesthetics of Noh Drama, 2/5/21 at 4PM

On Friday, February 5th at 4:00PM EST, we are cohosting “Kaija Saariaho and Peter Sellars’ Only the Sound Remains (2016): Transcoding the Aesthetics of Noh Drama” by Dr. Yayoi Uno Everett as part of the Irna Priore Music and Culture Lecture Series. Dr. Everett will be presenting on the opera Only the Sound Remains and “considering the opera as a transcultural adaptation of Noh drama, this presentation explores three main questions. How does Sellars reimagine the illusory world of Noh drama into a contemporary opera and infuse it with familiar archetypes from western mythology? How does Saariaho’s music salvage characteristics central to the music of Noh drama and transcodethem into her own musico-dramatic aesthetics? Finally, given David Levin’s claim that contemporary opera is ‘a site where the operatic text competes with the performance text’ (2007: xviii), how does one account for “the tension between sight and sound” (McClary 2019: 136) that lies  at the heart of this collaboration?”